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No, I don't think Linux killed the Unix workstations. The workstation market mostly shifted to x86 + Windows NT. What Linux + x86 did kill was the entry- and m

by jabl 6y ago

No, I don't think Linux killed the Unix workstations. The workstation market mostly shifted to x86 + Windows NT. What Linux + x86 did kill was the entry- and mid-range Unix server market. Redhat grew very rich largely by offering a cheaper platform (x86 + RHEL) to run Oracle RDBMS. And when the web started taking off, Linux + x86 was the default platform (still is). Similarly, the technical computing market (clusters, supercomputers, etc.) more or less completely migrated to x86 + Linux. IBM sort of survived this carnage by retreating into the high end, and by having a lot of other business (consulting, mainframes, software, etc.) that they could leverage. Sometimes I wonder if Sun could have survived if they had gone for the x86 commodity hardware route. They already had built the first generation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun386i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun386i ) but instead decided to go all-in on SPARC and bespoke hardware.

ghaff 6y ago
Yeah. Windows NT and commodity x86 killed Unix workstations. That's where the software support was. I'm actually not sure to what degree Linux "workstations" became a big deal. You have Linux clients but most of the software ran on back-end servers.
dkarl 6y ago
I can't claim any authority on this topic, because I only witnessed the tail end of it as a clueless junior dev, but one thing I saw at a couple of companies was Linux creating a less risky path to commodity workstation hardware. People with Unix-based computing workflows saw that they could achieve something similar on Linux on commodity hardware, and the hardware was cheap so it was wasn't a huge risk to try it out. After they were successfully working with Linux and could see that the commodity hardware was sufficient for their workflow, then it wasn't so radical to cast their eye over to Windows and see what software was available there, maybe be tempted by more polished desktop software and easier IT solutions for businesses. And they could try it out by dual-booting their existing Linux workstations. I'm sure some people made the double jump straight from commercial Unix workstations to Windows, but for people who did not want to take any big risks, Linux broke up the leap into smaller steps.
- jabl 6y ago
  I think a large factor was that many engineers had a PC on their desk as well for MS Office, email, various corporate apps made in VB (before the web), and so forth. When x86 & NT became good enough for whatever engineering application they were working with, there was a large incentive to switch that one to NT and consolidate everything on one machine.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "Sometimes I wonder if Sun could have survived if they had gone for the x86 commodity hardware route." They did try again in the late '00s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ultra_series#x86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ultra_series#x86 I always wondered why that didn't work out for them; seemed like a natural pivot.
- icedchai 6y ago
  Sun/Solaris peaked with the dot-com boom. They did put the dot in dot-com, after all. Linux was often seen as too immature, so many startups (at least the ones I am personally familiar with...) went with Sun hardware. By the late 00's, Linux was much more solid and Sun didn't stand a chance.
- jabl 6y ago
  Too little too late, fundamentally. They did a Hail Mary effort with ZFS & dtrace, but in the end few people cared enough to switch.
brandmeyer 6y ago
If you look at the kinds of commercial engineering applications that used to be staples of the workstation market, this is spot on. Even today, it can be hard or impossible to run them in Linux. - Matlab - Pro/E - Solidworks - Ansys - Autocad - Altium - STK
- guenthert 6y ago
  Can't speak about all those applications, but from my (brief) experience in supporting engineering applications running on the compute cluster of a large car manufacturer in central Europe, I can say that setting those applications up / configuring them for batch processing might not be exactly trivial, but we did succeed eventually (sometimes with the help of the original developer) with all requested ones. Windows is used in this context only on the engineer's workstation -- in the cluster it's Linux only (no other *nix in sight).
- SubjectToChange 6y ago
  Matlab runs on Linux just fine, AFAIK.
  - brandmeyer 6y ago
    It does, and we use it at work this way without difficulty. But its an exception. Windows is much more common among our users, even for Matlab.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  Anything that needs serious amounts of compute runs on Linux, because no one runs cluster/batch processing on something other than Linux.
indymike 6y ago
Sun offered intel based workstations and servers.

by jabl 6y ago

ghaff 6y ago

Yeah. Windows NT and commodity x86 killed Unix workstations. That's where the software support was. I'm actually not sure to what degree Linux "workstations" became a big deal. You have Linux clients but most of the software ran on back-end servers.

dkarl 6y ago

I can't claim any authority on this topic, because I only witnessed the tail end of it as a clueless junior dev, but one thing I saw at a couple of companies was Linux creating a less risky path to commodity workstation hardware. People with Unix-based computing workflows saw that they could achieve something similar on Linux on commodity hardware, and the hardware was cheap so it was wasn't a huge risk to try it out. After they were successfully working with Linux and could see that the commodity hardware was sufficient for their workflow, then it wasn't so radical to cast their eye over to Windows and see what software was available there, maybe be tempted by more polished desktop software and easier IT solutions for businesses. And they could try it out by dual-booting their existing Linux workstations. I'm sure some people made the double jump straight from commercial Unix workstations to Windows, but for people who did not want to take any big risks, Linux broke up the leap into smaller steps.

jabl 6y ago
I think a large factor was that many engineers had a PC on their desk as well for MS Office, email, various corporate apps made in VB (before the web), and so forth. When x86 & NT became good enough for whatever engineering application they were working with, there was a large incentive to switch that one to NT and consolidate everything on one machine.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

> "Sometimes I wonder if Sun could have survived if they had gone for the x86 commodity hardware route." They did try again in the late '00s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ultra_series#x86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ultra_series#x86 I always wondered why that didn't work out for them; seemed like a natural pivot.

icedchai 6y ago
Sun/Solaris peaked with the dot-com boom. They did put the dot in dot-com, after all. Linux was often seen as too immature, so many startups (at least the ones I am personally familiar with...) went with Sun hardware. By the late 00's, Linux was much more solid and Sun didn't stand a chance.
jabl 6y ago
Too little too late, fundamentally. They did a Hail Mary effort with ZFS & dtrace, but in the end few people cared enough to switch.

brandmeyer 6y ago

If you look at the kinds of commercial engineering applications that used to be staples of the workstation market, this is spot on. Even today, it can be hard or impossible to run them in Linux. - Matlab - Pro/E - Solidworks - Ansys - Autocad - Altium - STK

guenthert 6y ago
Can't speak about all those applications, but from my (brief) experience in supporting engineering applications running on the compute cluster of a large car manufacturer in central Europe, I can say that setting those applications up / configuring them for batch processing might not be exactly trivial, but we did succeed eventually (sometimes with the help of the original developer) with all requested ones. Windows is used in this context only on the engineer's workstation -- in the cluster it's Linux only (no other *nix in sight).
SubjectToChange 6y ago
Matlab runs on Linux just fine, AFAIK.
- brandmeyer 6y ago
  It does, and we use it at work this way without difficulty. But its an exception. Windows is much more common among our users, even for Matlab.
formerly_proven 6y ago
Anything that needs serious amounts of compute runs on Linux, because no one runs cluster/batch processing on something other than Linux.

indymike 6y ago

Sun offered intel based workstations and servers.